Part one of a series.
The Bogeyman of Theocracy
Israel’s Guardians of Secularism are fond of using the bogeyman of “theocracy” to frighten the public on issues involving the relationship between religion and state. They have conditioned Israelis to believe that “theocracy” means the “rule of priests,” and hardly anything can be more undemocratic—right? Israel’s Secular Priesthood associate theocracy with the Dark Ages, the Catholic Church, Ayatollah Khomeini, Inquisitions, auto-de-fés, tyranny—something utterly contrary to the Enlightenment embodied in “the only democracy in the Middle East.”
The Illuminati are ever vigilant about “religious coercion.” They fulminate against Sabbath restrictions on commercial activities in a reputedly Jewish state, yet they applaud the secular coercion of a government that expelled 8,000 Jews from their homes in Gush Katif, leveled theirs schools and synagogues, destroyed their farms and factories, and traumatized women and children as well as the elderly while pulverizing their flourishing communities. The hypocrisy of Israel’s Secular Guardians betrays their hatred of Judaism.
All the talk about theocracy is obscurantism: there never has been a theocracy—thank God! What the Guardians of Secularism regard as a theocracy or theocratic state is in fact a “clerical” state, where a small minority uses the aura of religion to rule ignorant masses. Today, a small minority in Israel uses the aura of democracy to rule the masses. This ruling minority employs the myth of theocracy to obscure the fact that Israeli democracy is also a myth, except on election day. On that marvelous day the masses vote. How?
The voter enters a booth and sees some thirty stacks of small slips of paper representing a welter of political parties. Printed on these slips are not the names of a party’s candidates, but only an obscure two- or three-letter code name of that party. The voter selects a slip, deposits it in a ballot box, and then relapses into servitude, as will be demonstrated later. Meanwhile, we need to define the term theocracy to appreciate how much the people of Israel have been deceived and disempowered by the Guardians of Secularism.
“Theocracy” literally means the “rule of God,” which only signifies that God is the ultimate source of law and authority. This definition makes the American Declaration of Independence a theocratic document! The signatories of the Declaration justified their rebellion against the laws of Great Britain by appealing to a higher law, “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” Not the laws of parliaments and kings, but the laws of God endow man with the “unalienable rights” to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Thus, “whenever any Form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it …” [emphasis added]. What a marvelous, theologically inspired document!
It is not widely known that most of the original thirteen states of the American Union incorporated the Declaration of Independence into their constitutions. Abraham Lincoln saw in that revolutionary document the political philosophy of the Federal Constitution. Logic impels us to conclude that the Declaration embodies the theological underpinning of the Constitution. Since the signatories of the Declaration acknowledge God as the “Creator” and therefore the ultimate Source of man’s unalienable rights, they thereby affirm the theological basis of that document. Without that basis, the Declaration’s long list of moral and political grievances against the British Crown would have no moral justification.
Moreover, since the laws and institutions prescribed in the Constitution were designed to preclude those very grievances, all the more reason to conclude that the Constitution translates into political terms the theological principles of the Declaration.[1] This theological interpretation conforms to contemporaneous statements of Harvard president Samuel Langdon and Yale president Ezra Stiles who held that the American Constitution was very much rooted in Jewish ideas and tacitly based on the Ten Commandments.[2]
Nevertheless, no one deemed the government established under the Constitution a theocracy—quite apart from the First Amendment. That amendment, as initially understood, simply prohibited Congress from establishing a State religion. Revolted by the example of England, the founding fathers refused to sacralize the modern national state, which they deemed powerful enough without investing it with religious authority or even a unitary form.[3] Instead of a centralized-bureaucratic system of government, they established federalism, which requires local self-government (as does the Torah, under which each tribe, later called a district, had its own Governor and Small Sanhedrin).
Moreover, in a monotheistic culture, the people are sovereign under God, not the State. Viewed within the context of such a culture, the First Amendment does not prevent Congress from passing laws supportive of the monotheism and universal moral values of the Declaration of Independence.
Although the Constitution did not establish a ruling priesthood, it did establish a Supreme Court whose powers are quite extraordinary. In litigation before the Court, a handful of judges can declare null and void any act of the Legislature or of the Executive, which, in the Court’s judgment, violates the Constitution.
The Court can therefore invalidate laws enacted by a democratically elected Congress and approved by a democratically elected President. This suggests that the rulings of the Court, whose judges have been influenced by the triumphant secularism of higher education, can undermine the religious beliefs and moral values of the American people.
Thus, the American Constitution, without prescribing a theocratic form of government, prescribes a Supreme Court whose power arguably exceeds the authority of the Great Sanhedrin!
This is certainly true of Israel’s Supreme Court, whose former president or High Priest, Aharon Barak, laid down the unprecedented dictum that “everything is justiciable.” This dictum encourages the Court to intrude not only into all the Legislative and Executive functions of government. It invites the Court to substitute its own predilections for the laws of the Torah. The Court thus ascribes to itself almost the divine right to prescribe the way of life, the morality, of the Jewish people!
Operative in Israel—“the only democracy in the Middle East”—is a judicial tyranny. The power of this tyranny expands under the aura of democracy cynically intoned by Israel’s ruling elites. Israel is ruled by a clique of Illuminati dispensing contemporary justice as it sees fit, unrestrained by tradition. This clique has arrogated to itself powers no Great Sanhedrin ever contemplated.
Pundits rightly call Israel a “Courtocracy.” The power of this Courtocracy gives the lie to secularists who rant about “theocracy.” To see how this godless Courtocracy has robbed the people of Israel of the power that would be theirs under the Torah, we must examine the term theocracy in relation to Judaism.
(To be continued)
[1] I do not ignore the influence of Locke and Montesquieu, whose mentality, however, is hardly conceivable divorced from the biblical tradition.
[2] Samuel Langdon, “Election Sermon of 1775,” in John Wingate Thornton, Pulpit of the American Revolution (Boston, 1860), p. 239.
[3] I am indebted to Prof. Will Morrisey for this view of the First Amendment.
